WordPress 4.6 – Native & Shiny

The clear and detailed description of the new features is something worth focusing on. More information about what, why and how has been improved is available on the official WordPress website.

New features are discussed in a simple and coherent way. Just a quick preview is enough to understand that many interesting things are now improved and others – fixed.

WordPress 4.6 is named Native & Shiny because it perfectly suits the new version and these two features simply cannot stay unnoticed.

See what’s new in 4.6.

Shiny Updates

One of the Shiny Updates plugin features was added earlier in WordPress 4.2 and enables users to update and install plugins and themes without being redirected to the progress screen.
In 4.6 Shiny Updates is updated to version 2. This improvement brings more options and enhances experience when installing, updating, and deleting plugins or themes.

For these actions now Ajax is used so the progress screen is hidden at the background. Thus users do not see an additional page containing technical information and confirmation of the running processes (The Bleak Screen of Sadness).

Ajax will be also used for the search feature as well as on the theme and plugin pages. Results will be displayed while users are still typing into the search box.

This Shiny Updates improvement enhances user experience by simplifying the installation procedure, updating and removing plugins or themes in WordPress.

Native System Fonts in the Admin Panel

Open Sans was introduced in v. 3.8 back in 2013. The font is usually downloaded and loaded from Google Fonts.

So for WordPress that is an external resource that should be loaded each time you access a page from the admin panel. Removing this non-native resource does not only offer а more consistent look across devices, but also increases page loading times.

System fonts are stored on the device from which the WordPress panel is accessed. They are immediately loaded as this does not depend on internet connectivity or other server conditions, influencing external resources download.

Editor Improvements

There are also improvements in the autosave and restore feature of the revisions.

One of the fixes affects restoring posts (Restore This Autosave), even when revisions are disabled. Revisions (content versions) can be disabled by adding “define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false );” to the wp-config.php file.

⭐ You can read more about WordPress 4.6 improvements and bigfuxes also in the following articles: Beta 1, Beta 2, Beta 3 and Beta 4.

Note:
We highly recommend that you make a full website backup. before updating to 4.6. In case you forgot to do this, you can easily restore your website from WordPress Manager by SuperHosting in cPanel.

Madlena Metodieva (Megan)

Technical Support Specialist

Megan is our support guru – she can answer every technical question. She knows everything about new technologies. Megan's SuperPower is that she can explain even the most complicated technologies in plain language.